This invention relates to a transport apparatus of the type in which a capsule in which is accommodated a number of flat articles is transported by air flow through a transport pipeline.
Conventionally, this type of transport apparatus has already been known wherein a capsule in which is accommodated articles is transported by air flow through a pipeline. Advantageous convenience of the transport apparatus has been highly evaluated, because articles can be transported from a stockroom to a utilization place in a workshop, without disturbing the other workings and requiring any surplus space.
The conventional transport apparatus utilizing the air flow, however, fails to transport flat articles such as a carton for storage of various materials which collapses into a flat form prior to storage of the material, and a cover or lid of a vessel. In general, these flat bodies are accommodated in a container such as shown in FIG. 1 for their storage in the stockroom. Typically, when accommodating these flat bodies in the container, a number of flat bodies (200 to 300 sheets in the case of carton) are respectively aligned uprightly and juxtaposed laterally to form an elongated block of the flat bodies. A plurality of such blocks, each extending laterally, are loaded into the container in row and column pattern. However, no prior arrangement can pull out the loaded flat bodies from the container, without disturbing their block form, to charge the pulled-out block into the capsule and pull out the charged block of, for example, carbons from the capsule to set that block into a loader. Without this arrangement, the conventional transport apparatus utilizing air flow cannot transport the flat bodies, simply leading to the fact that when the carton block is pulled out of the container or the capsule by means of a known pull-out arrangement, the block collapses and cartons are spread.
For these reasons, it has been practice to transport the container per se accommodating the flat bodies from the stockroom to the utilization place, resulting in disadvantages that the other workings are disturbed and a surplus space is required for storage and transport of the container.